James West turned a tiny microphone into a very big
career. The Hopkins research professor has already
revolutionized the field of electroacoustics. Now he's
setting his sights on medicine, the Internet, and
beyond.

The first time James West was almost electrocuted, he was
more intrigued than shocked.

West was about 10 years old. Someone had thrown away an old
radio near his home in rural Virginia, and he wanted to
plug it in to see if it worked. Standing on a brass bed in
his bedroom, he reached for an electrical outlet in the
ceiling.

"It was a nice humid day," he remembers.

He felt the vibration from his fingers to his toes. "My
whole body was rattling," he says. "I got hung up. My
brother had to push me away."

West wasn't hurt, just sore. But he was hooked. "It was
terribly intriguing from a standpoint of how electricity
worked," he says. "I had to learn more about that."

That energizing shock in the 1940s created a lasting charge
in West's life that led him — many years later
— to co-develop a permanently charged microphone that
would propel technology, and everyday communications, far
beyond the range of that plug-in radio.

"His invention revolutionized the telephone and recording
industries," says Fred Juang, professor and chair of
electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Institute of
Technology. "Today, billions of units have been made with
his electret microphone" — a compact, highly
sensitive, and inexpensive alternative to the carbon
microphones common in the 1950s.

In fact, every time someone picks up a telephone, turns on
a hearing aid, or pulls the string on a talking Elmo doll,
sound travels through West's invention, which launched his
40-year career at Bell Laboratories (now Lucent
Technologies) and landed him in the National Inventors Hall
of Fame.

West's name is inked on 47 U.S. and 200 foreign patents. He
has authored more than 100 scientific papers in
electroacoustical research and related fields. Last year,
at 72, an age when most people are comfortably ensconced in
retirement, West became a research professor in Johns
Hopkins'
Whiting School of Engineering.

"He's just a wonderful catch," says Hopkins
mechanical
engineering professor Ilene Busch-Vishniac, who
collaborated with West on engineering projects at Bell
Labs. Busch-Vishniac, dean of the Whiting School until she
stepped down in June, helped lure West to Hopkins last
fall. "There were 10 different universities chasing him,"
she says. "Colleagues at the nine other universities told
me, 'We don't know how you got him, but we're jealous.'"

West came to Hopkins, he says, to pursue a variety of
research projects — ranging from how to improve
teleconferencing technology via the Internet to finding
ways to use the small electrical fields generated by
electrets to foster cell regeneration. To do so, he hopes
to collaborate with a variety of researchers at Homewood
and the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Like Bell Labs,
Hopkins has no high walls between departments or campuses.
"If I'm interested in something in astronomy and I want to
know more about it," West says, "I [feel] that researchers
here are very willing to sit down and talk."

A longtime leader of minority internship and hiring
programs at Bell Labs, West also has been named chair of
the Whiting School's Divisional Diversity Council, the
school's first diversity advisory group. (See
"A Dedication to Diversity"
below)

Sitting in his office at 214 Barton Hall, West looks far
younger than his seven decades. His face is lined, but with
character, it seems, not age. His slightly graying hair is
pulled back into the nub of a ponytail. His reading glasses
hang by a cord around his neck, and a linen handkerchief is
tucked into the back pocket of his khakis. A model Formula
1 Ford sits on his windowsill.

West is not a standard-issue academic hire. Though a member
of the National Academy of Engineering and a distinguished
fellow at Bell Labs, he has no PhD — in fact, he
doesn't officially hold a bachelor's degree. (He completed
the undergraduate coursework, plus master's courses, at
Temple University in Philadelphia, but never matriculated
with a bachelor's because he got caught up pursuing his
invention.) While in college, he attended Black Panther
meetings and read the writings of Russian revolutionary
Leon Trotsky. The son of an entrepreneur and a
schoolteacher, and the grandson of a former slave, he was a
maverick in his own family because he wanted to study
physics.

In 1999, West was inducted into the National Inventors Hall
of Fame, in Akron, Ohio, for the invention of the electret
microphone. Despite all of his accomplishments, he was in
awe.

"Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Marconi — you
know, all my heroes — these were people that, when I
grew up, I wanted to be like them," he says of other
renowned members of the Hall of Fame. "To be mentioned in
the same breath was kind of devastating. Wow. It couldn't
be real."

West and fellow researcher Gerhard Sessler at Bell Labs
in 1976, with their electret microphone.Photo courtesy of Lucent
Technologies Inc.

Born James Edward Maceo West on February 10, 1931, he came
into the world in his family's home because his mother was
not allowed in the whites-only hospital in the town of
Farmville, Virginia, about an hour's drive west of
Richmond. His family wasn't poor. Over the years, his
father, Samuel Edward West, had launched a series of
businesses. At various points, he was a funeral home owner,
B & O Railroad porter, and insurance salesman.

"He did what was needed to keep food on the table," his son
remembers. James West's uncle, a dentist, built a medical
clinic that served mostly the black community; West and his
brother, Nathaniel, were expected to work there someday.

"My father's family felt very strongly that the direction
in education should be in the four professions at that time
open to black people," says West, who speaks softly,
thoughtfully, but with an edge. "Lawyer, doctor, teacher,
and preacher — we had all of them in the family."

Nathaniel West did end up practicing dentistry in their
uncle's clinic and went on to teach public health dentistry
at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He remembers his
older brother's tinkering and the trouble he got into. "He
used to take my toys to pieces," says Nathaniel West,
professor of endodontics at Howard. "He took his
grandfather's watch and left it in pieces and couldn't put
it back. That's what stands out in my mind — that
watch."

"A screwdriver and pliers were very dangerous. Anything
that had screws in it, I could open up," James West
remembers. "I was always fascinated by how things work and
why things work. Models of airplanes, cars, and so forth .
. . that is where I lived."

In the 1940s, West's cousin Edward B. Allen, a
schoolteacher, worked parttime wiring homes in rural
Virginia that were just getting electricity. At age 12,
West went to work for him, learning everything Edward knew
about electricity. "My job was to crawl under the houses
and carry the wire from one place to another," West
remembers. "It was a relief for my mom, too. Somebody else
had to worry about what I got into.

"As a result of that training, I learned how electricity
behaves. Today, if I have to change an outlet, I never go
and throw the switch" — a feat, he says, that usually
"impresses people."

When he graduated from high school, he first enrolled as a
premed at Hampton University in Virginia in the late 1940s.
When he transferred to Temple, he decided to switch to
solid state physics. His parents weren't pleased — he
was cut off financially. "I had decided not to stay in the
sciences that led to premed. So I was cut loose, put on my
own," he remembers. "I guess I learned very early in life
that in spite of the punishment, I was going to do what was
most important to me.

"My parents were tough on me, but boy, do I appreciate that
now. I've never forgotten the discipline and other things
important in life," he adds. "My parents were both active
in organizations focused on the emancipation of black
people. [W.E.B.] Du Bois was one of the people I learned
about early in life. All of this has been part of my
upbringing. It's a very important part of why I'm
interested in diversity."

West's mother, Matilda, a schoolteacher, also worked at
Langley Air Force Base during the Joseph McCarthy era. She
lost her job at the base because she was a leader in the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
a group that the red-baiting senator had labeled communist.
Her son would go further, attending Black Panthers meetings
in Philadelphia when he was a student at Temple. He also
became a fan of Trotsky. "I became more immersed in racist
attitudes toward black people." he says. "Living in
Philadelphia, I saw a whole different perspective from the
standpoint of poverty and the deplorable situations in
which some people are forced to survive. I lost confidence
in the system."

During his college years, before he transferred to Temple,
West was drafted to serve in the Korean War, where he was
awarded a Purple Heart. But West, who later became a
pacifist, doesn't like to talk about his military service.
"War is no way to solve anything," he says. "I've put most
of that stuff out of my head."

He found solace in science. West was hired as an intern at
Bell Laboratories in the mid-1950s, when few African
Americans worked for the firm. He would become one of those
kid-in-a-candy-store scientists who love their jobs. Yet,
because of his anti-authoritarian politics, he also would
eventually challenge the corporate culture. Bell Labs, one
of America's technological powerhouses, was founded by
West's hero, inventor Alexander Graham Bell. West wanted
the company to retain its emphasis on research, not profit,
and he was known for sending company CEOs pointed memos,
requesting meetings, and even approaching a top executive
on an airline flight to talk about where the company should
focus its energy.

"He's not afraid of being fired," says Juang, a colleague
of West's at Bell for 20 years. "He is a very strong
character."

Over the years, West says, he earned only $1 from all the
patents that bear his name. As members of the Bell Labs
research team, scientists like West did not personally
profit from their inventions. That didn't matter. Money
wasn't his goal.

"People say, 'Oh gosh. You really got treated badly,'" he
says. "But I'm having such a great life. Being allowed to
be what I wanted to be has been worth far more than I ever
imagined. The pursuit of knowledge and expansion of
knowledge is really a privilege."

"People say, 'Oh gosh. You really got treated badly,'"
West says. "But I'm having such a great life. Being allowed
to be what I wanted to be has been worth far more than I
ever imagined."

His focus on science for science's sake prompted the
invention that would charge West's career. In the
mid-1950s, a group of psychoacousticians (psychologists
interested in sound) at Bell Labs and elsewhere wanted to
understand the performance of the human ear, West
remembers. The question: What sort of time delay between
two pulses is required for the ear to hear two separate
sounds? (They later found out it's 15 milliseconds). But to
answer the question, they needed a linear transducer
— a microphone and earphone — with a broad
frequency to efficiently convert electrical energy into
sound pressure, and vice versa.

Among other inadequacies, the microphones of the day
— condenser microphones invented at Bell Labs in the
early 1900s — could not produce enough sound pressure
for such fine measurements. Condenser mikes also required
an unwieldy battery power source. So West, then in the
second year of his PhD and an intern in Bell Labs'
acoustics research department in Murray Hill, New Jersey,
was asked to help tackle the problem.

Edward E. David, former executive director of systems
research at Bell Labs, was among those who had brought West
on board. "We were convinced he would do well, but we had
no idea that he would do as well as he did," says David,
now a principal member of the Washington Advisory Group, a
government and industry consulting agency. "He climbed the
ladder, and he did it fairly rapidly and did it in great
style. The work he did was very valuable."

West and fellow researcher Gerhard Sessler built an
earphone that seemed to do the job using a solid dielectric
condenser microphone, a dielectric being a substance that
can prevent the flow of electricity and store electrostatic
energy. The transducer, which used a polymer foil with a
metal layer on top, was sensitive enough to create two
quick pulses. But it still required a 500-volt battery. The
microphones also lost sensitivity over time, and thus were
not commercially produced. (West got the second big shock
of his life when testing the earphone. "It stung and put a
burn mark in my ear for a long time. I guess they are brown
marks by now," he says, fingering his ear.)

Through further reading, West learned that to improve the
lifetime of the microphone, he needed to reverse the
polarity of the battery periodically to keep the charge
from neutralizing and essentially fizzling out. "If I had
to reverse the polarity of the battery, that meant that
something internal was happening," he says.

Then, in the process of reversing the 500-volt battery, the
leads to the microphone shorted out, and he and Sessler got
a very loud signal. At that point, the microphone started
transferring sound without juice from the battery. That
meant the charge was continuous. But how?

The answer was a word West had never heard: electret.

"My life really changed at that point," he says.
"Understanding this phenomenon became the single purpose in
my life. I made an effort to understand everything I could
about electrets." (In his pursuit, West dropped his
doctoral studies. "And I never looked back," he says with a
laugh. "I still haven't.")

He was ecstatic. "Discovery is the best high I've ever
had," he says. "It's extremely euphoric. It's true that
there is very little new in nature, but we can discover
more and more about nature."

As West learned, the study of electrets actually had been
around for a few hundred years. The first reference was in
1732, when English scientist Stephen Gray wrote a paper
detailing the "perpetual attractive power" of various
dielectrics, including waxes, rosins, and sulfur, according
to Electrets, Topics in Applied Physics (1980),
edited by Sessler, who is now at the University of
Darmstadt in Germany. Gray generated what appeared to be
static electricity with such materials as carnauba wax by
heating the wax, then cooling the melts in iron ladles.
Various scientists later tested the properties of electret
substances; an electret was eventually defined as a
material that retains its electric polarization after being
subjected to a strong electric field.

By applying the 500 volts across the earphone over a period
of time, the researchers had quasi-permanently charged, or
polarized, the microphone, using the polymer Mylar. Yet the
lifetime of the charge was only about six months.

The challenge was to come up with the right mix of
plastics. West and Sessler went to materials science
researchers at Bell Labs to talk about new polymers they
were working on. Teflon had been developed more than a
decade earlier by chemist Roy J. Plunkett, and its
properties were still being tested. In 1964, West and
Sessler published a paper that showed that Teflon retained
a charge with minimal decay. "We found that, under careful
conditions, we could inject a real charge into Teflon, and
we extrapolated lifetimes in the hundreds of years," West
says.

"The new and all important feature was the defined (and
stable) charging of the dielectric to make it an electret,"
says Sessler via e-mail from Germany.

In a practical sense, the innovation allowed the
development of microphones and other devices that could
maintain sensitivity — and remain charged —
over a long period of time. And there was no need for big,
costly batteries. "The difference between the standard
condenser and electret microphones was that we replaced the
battery with a charge that is embedded in a thin polymer
foil," West explains.

The microphones would be tiny — the size of a shirt
button — and the patented technology would be applied
to telephones and other devices beginning in 1968. At
first, Bell Labs wasn't sure the new technology could beat
the relatively low cost of the 56-cent carbon microphones
of the day. But the foil electret microphone's high
performance features — broad frequency, low noise,
light weight, and high sensitivity — still cost less,
at 10 cents per microphone today.

Electret technology has gone far beyond the telephone
receiver into such areas as medicine and space technology.
Among the applications West values most: the hearing aid.
The microphones in early hearing aids were heavy, and the
vibration sensitivity was high. "Before, it was impossible
for people to leave their hearing aid on when they walked;
the vibration was tremendous," West says. "Now people can
wear hearing aids all the time."

One application of the electret microphone, however, pains
him: military technology. During the Vietnam War, electret
microphones were linked to FM transmitters, and the jungles
seeded with the devices to track the movements of the Viet
Cong, he says. Even today, the electret microphone is found
in any modern war, especially in communication equipment
such as radios or satellite phones.

Scientists, after all, rarely control how their discoveries
are used. But they find ways to live with that. "One thing
you can do is put it in a different context for yourself,"
says West. "The fact that people are able to communicate
definitely could result in the saving of lives."

West, pictured here with graduate student Tyrone Hunter,
has been named chair of Engineering's Diversity Council.

West hopes to take a more active role in making sure lives
are saved. And he believes that science and discovery will
play the necessary dual roles.

In groundbreaking research in the late 1980s, West and
colleagues at Cornell University and Bell Labs, including
Busch-Vishniac, used an electret transducer with a wide
frequency to take sophisticated blood pressure readings
previously possible only with invasive pressure recordings
(in which a catheter is usually inserted in the artery). The
researchers also discovered a new algorithm that accurately
described the systolic and diastolic points found in blood
pressure readings.

The technology remains in the research stage, but the
potential is tremendous. "What I hope is that further studies
will allow us to be able to determine the performance of the
cardiovascular system non-invasively, with a simple device
that you could strap on," West says.

With more sensitive and accurate blood pressure cuffs,
doctors could more easily evaluate a person's blood pressure
cycle to detect, for example, artery-clogging plaque. As West
notes, "The shape of the cardiac cycle is a function of the
condition of the cardiovascular system."

Another motivator, he says, is the fact that heart disease
and hypertension rates are higher among African Americans.
"Heart conditions are basically the silent killers," says
West, who hopes to work with researchers at the School of
Medicine and elsewhere at Hopkins to develop such a device.
"This is a dream of mine."

Yet, isn't that project in the very field — medicine
— his father had wanted him to pursue?

West smiles. "It all comes back," he says. "It's all
circular."

Samuel West, who died in the 1960s, never learned about his
son's latest dream. "He knew that I was on my way," West
says. If his exacting father had been around for the
following decades, West says, "I think he would be very
proud."

The researcher's return to the academy, however, will remain
a quintessentially James West endeavor. As Sessler notes,
West is a "dedicated, restless scientist, always on the run
for new discoveries."

"I really want to be on the leading edge of research," West
says. After four decades and countless accolades, he didn't
want to sit back and be a consultant. "As a consultant, I'd
be solving other people's problems," West says. "My problems
are much more important."